Leslie Hinkson (center) is one of four graduate students who
already have taken advantage of the international fellowships offered through
the Global Network on Inequality. She studied last year at the London School of
Economics’ Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion.

Below left: Hinkson joined 45
scholars from the Global Network’s member institutions and 50 faculty members
and graduate students from U.S. institutions in April at a conference on
Princeton’s campus titled “New Directions in Inequality and Stratification.”

Program offers grad students a world of opportunities

Posted June 22, 2006; 03:38 p.m.

by Denise Barricklow

Junior year abroad is almost a rite of passage for undergraduates
these days. Graduate students in the social sciences at Princeton now have a
similar opportunity to expand their educational horizons.

The new Global Network on Inequality provides fellowships for
graduate students in sociology and politics to conduct research abroad in
collaboration with scholars at 15 institutions in Western Europe, Japan, India
and South Africa. The program allows students specializing in the study of
political participation, immigration or educational inequality, for example, to
gather and analyze data examining parallel problems in other countries for a
period of two months. Funded by the Princeton Institute for International and
Regional Studies (PIIRS) and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs, the program is enabling graduate students to pursue
topics as diverse as the social determinants of educational inequality in South
Africa and the role of women in the labor force in Germany.

“This experiment in international research places Princeton at the
forefront of a new kind of graduate training in the social sciences,” said
Katherine Newman, the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941, Professor of
Sociology and Public Affairs, who founded the program. “In the end, our
students are going to be vastly advantaged by having this experience. It will
change the shape of their research.”

Newman noted that European doctoral students routinely complete
their training in multiple countries and have the benefit of working with
faculty from different intellectual traditions. “It will be a boon for
Princeton students to be able to do the same,” she said. “This is part of what
globalization means in higher education, and we think it’s the wave of the
future.”

She said the program also provides a counterpart to opportunities
for students in the natural sciences, who often work in laboratories in other
parts of the world. “In the social sciences, those opportunities tend to be
restricted to area specialists who plan to devote their careers to the study of
another society,” she said. “Princeton’s program is special because it extends
the opportunity for foreign research experience both to comparativists and to
those who plan to specialize in the study of American society.”

Organizers chose inequality as the focus for the network because of
the recent spread of disparities in income, educational attainment and health
in advanced industrial societies as well as in the developing world.

“The study of inequality may be
one of the least globalized, and this program is a great way to introduce
students to other people and perspectives and to show them that there is a
great return on the time and money invested in traveling outside of the United
States,” said Miguel Centeno, director of PIIRS. “I wish we had money to
[enable] every grad student in the social sciences do something similar.”

A unique opportunity

To win a fellowship from the Global Network on Inequality, graduate
students must first investigate data sets or fieldwork opportunities that might
be available in one of the 15 network partners (including prestigious
institutions such as Sciences Po in Paris, the London School of Economics and
the European University Institute in Florence). They submit proposals for short-term
research projects they can conduct under the supervision of a professor who is
on the faculty at one of the partner institutes. Their plans are reviewed by an
advisory committee at Princeton, followed by another one at the participating
institution. If the proposal is approved, the student receives a stipend that
covers travel and living expenses for two months of research abroad.

So far, four Princeton sociology graduate students have completed
fellowships and another eight — six in sociology and two in politics — will
study abroad between now and April 2007. The goal, Newman said, is to send 10
to 12 fellows abroad for residential fellowships each year.

“The network permits our students to go and learn in an
apprentice-like mode from colleagues in these different countries, who take
them under their wing and provide them with a sustained experience for a couple
of months,” Newman said.

One of the recent winners, Nick Ehrmann, a third-year graduate
student in sociology and demography who will travel next spring to South
Africa, said he was thrilled at the chance to gain new perspectives by studying
abroad. “In addition to anxiety, general lack of sleep and hours spent in
solitary confinement, the intense focus required for studies at the doctoral
level can have more hidden consequences. Our personal experiences and
perspectives are most often limited to one campus in one state in one country.
The Global Network on Inequality is an antidote to this kind of provincialism.”

Ehrmann, a former Teach for America elementary school teacher, said
his work examines the social determinants of educational inequality. “My
current research focuses on educational aspirations for higher education among
inner city youth in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “In Cape Town, I plan to
explore what predicts enrollment into higher education, using a comparative
perspective to better understand how family structure, peer relationships,
poverty and neighborhood structure affect how and whether students plan to
attend college.”

Christine Percheski, who is currently in residence at the
University of Bremen in Germany, also expressed enthusiasm for the program:
“American graduate students and researchers have a lot to gain by collaborating
with international colleagues, studying social inequality in new contexts and
considering new perspectives on research.”

Percheski’s work focuses on how changes in women’s employment and
family structures are related to changes in income inequality in the United
States over the last 40 years, and Newman said she was convinced Percheski’s
work abroad would enhance her domestic research immeasurably. “Christine is
interested in the relation between women’s work and family obligations. She
went to Germany because they have one of the best data archives on the life
course in the world and a distinguished faculty focused on this methodology.”

“She will return to Princeton having completed a research project
using German data that would have been impossible to access here, and having
forged important ties with major figures in the field,” Newman continued.
“While Christine expects to be a specialist in the study of life course
dynamics in the U.S., she will have a comparative perspective that will be
invaluable.”

The fellowships are expected to have a lasting impact on each of
the participating students. “I think we will see that their careers will change
because of this experience and that they’ll end up going back to pursue these
topics once they leave Princeton,” Newman said.

Leslie Hinkson, who studied last year at the London School of
Economics’ Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE), is already talking
about returning to the United Kingdom once she’s completed her dissertation on
racial and ethnic gaps in standardized U.S. test scores and how different
academic settings, particularly schools run by the military abroad, can reduce
or eliminate these differences.

“My time in London was spent in part thinking of future avenues of
research beyond my dissertation. While at CASE, I found that much of the theory
on race and race relations that was being utilized in sociology was either
imported from the United States or from the field of psychology within the
United Kingdom. So there seems to be great opportunity for contributing to the
creation of a race theory that is rooted in the U.K. experience.”

Academic exchange

Recognizing that graduate students aren’t the only ones who can
benefit from international exchanges, the network also works to bring renowned
scholars together to share information and insights. The Global Network
recently sponsored a major international conference titled “New Directions in
Inequality and Stratification” as part of the 75th anniversary of the Woodrow
Wilson School. Nolan McCarty, professor of politics and an associate dean of
the Woodrow Wilson School, spoke at the event, which he described as “a rare
opportunity to talk across both geographic but also disciplinary borders about
important problems.”

“The broader issues covered by
the network — inequality, stratification, poverty, migration — are no longer
purely domestic problems,” McCarty added. “They are problems faced collectively
by all nations and increasingly have an international dimension. So an academic
exchange among scholars working globally is especially important.”

Some 45 scholars from the member institutions of the Global Network
visited Princeton for the April 6-8 conference to present their work and to hear
papers from Princeton faculty in economics, politics and sociology. More than
50 faculty members and graduate students from U.S. universities, including
Yale, Cornell, NYU, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, the City University
of New York and the University of Pennsylvania, contributed to the event as
well.

Among those in attendance was Professor Yoshimichi Sato, director
of the Tohoku University Center for the Study of Inequality and Social
Stratification in Sendia, Japan, one of the network’s participating
institutions. He said the conference provided him with some invaluable
connections. “The recent conference was a wonderful opportunity to meet
specialists in my field. In Japan, information on social stratification in
Europe is not very accessible, so meeting people from Europe and other
countries was very stimulating.”

Karl Ulrich Mayer, chair of the sociology department at Yale and a
discussant at the conference, also voiced praise for the network’s outreach
efforts. “I think it is an important and useful enterprise because it connects
research centers and especially graduate students and researchers from many
countries, opening a perspective on between-country inequalities in addition to
within-country inequalities. By comparing the mechanisms, explaining
inequalities becomes more apparent.”

In the future, the Global Network
is likely to expand its international scope as well as its disciplinary reach
to facilitate the research of graduate students in psychology and economics.
The flow of faculty from the institutes to Princeton is expected to increase as
well. “This is a unique opportunity to spread the word about the outstanding
research done at Princeton and to learn firsthand about the equally impressive
work done by our colleagues in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America,” Newman
said.